


A Shoulder to Cry On

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: October 2020 Prompts [11]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1, Avengers Tower, Deaf Clint Barton, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Nightmares, One Shot, POV Third Person, Post-Avengers (2012), Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, The Avengers Are Good Bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:34:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26950726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: The first time they see each other cry.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Clint Barton & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark & Thor
Series: October 2020 Prompts [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947679
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	A Shoulder to Cry On

**Author's Note:**

> Day 11, for the prompt "crying"

When you end up saving the world with someone, you tend to get to know them pretty well. That went double for when you saved the world with a group of someones and then moved into the thousand-foot high-rise that one of the someones just happened to have lying around because, oh yeah: billionaire; and now there were things like combined training sessions and sharing a quinjet and even—once or twice,  _ maybe _ —a movie night. All of which were supposed to make them better at working as part of a team.

(This was easier for some of them than for others).

And they  _ were _ a team, more or less, by now. Only a month or so after the Chitauri, when Tony had redone the parts of the tower that had gotten smashed up during the fight, when Clint had started to notice the sideways looks the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents gave him in the halls, when Bruce had given in to the allure of a Stark-Industries-designed lab, when Natasha had followed Clint out the door, when Steve had discovered just how hard it was to find a decent apartment in New York, and when Thor decided that maybe it would be better to stay on Earth for a little while longer as Loki faced punishment in Asgard… that was when they all looked up at the giant red “A” on the front of Tony’s tower and thought  _ why not. _

And it might’ve been a little… sticky, at first, but they were past that point. Two months after the Chitauri… that had apparently been the magic number.

The Avengers. A team that had pretty much seen it all, because what else would you expect when a group of people like that were thrown together in such a messy jumble, shaking hands one moment and watching each other almost die the next?

Even so, however, there were still some things that they were careful  _ not _ to let the others see.

* * *

Clint was in the kitchen, because his last couple rounds of archery practice had left his arms sore and his shirt sticking to the back of his neck, and a grilled cheese was sounding like the best damn thing in the world.

He had taken out his hearing aids in order to better concentrate on the targets, and they were still in his pocket as he wandered around the kitchen muttering about where the hell Tony Stark would keep a spatula simply because there hadn’t been any reason to put them back in. The rest of the team was probably asleep, after all, and even if any of them weren’t, nobody had run into him yet. As far as he knew, he had the place to himself.

Clint finally located the spatula (in the _ silverware _ drawer?) and turned back around. Where Steve Rogers was standing in the doorway.

A lot of things happened at once.

The spatula slipped out of his hand and landed with a clatter on top of the frying pan that had been gently sizzling on the stove. This sent the frying pan flying up—right for his face.

Luckily, Clint had the reflexes of a trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and managed to catch it. Unluckily, he was Clint Barton, and so he caught it by the side instead of the handle.

The side that was currently  _ burning burning hot oh god this thing must be a million degrees. _

Clint swore, the word vibrating in his throat as he dropped the frying pan  _ again _ and barely watched as it skittered across the floor. He wrapped his fingers around the burned hand and waited for the throbbing to go down, very aware of the fact that Steve was still watching him.

Actually, Steve was standing next to him now, as Clint confirmed with a brief lift of his head before he curled his hand back into his chest. He was probably trying to talk to him, but Clint couldn’t concentrate enough to read his lips, so all he saw was Steve’s mouth moving in an apology-shaped kind of way.

He dug the hearing aids out of his pocket and slid them back in, a trickier process than usual with only one hand that wasn’t currently screaming in agony. There was a crackling noise, and then Steve’s voice suddenly sounded in his ear.

“—okay? Clint?”

“Sure,” Clint said, which wasn’t the right answer, but it was the first word that popped out of his mouth. He cautiously peeked at his hand, which was flushed red, even though the stinging was starting to fade.

Steve nodded, frowning as he glanced around the kitchen. “Is something burning?”

“Yeah, me.”

Clint stuck his fingers in his mouth for a second.  _ Ow. _ “So, what can I do for you, Cap?”

Steve’s frown deepened before he apparently remembered that they were in the kitchen. He leaned over to turn off the stove. “I was just getting some water. Seriously, though, are you alright?”

“Oh, yeah,” Clint took his burned fingers out of his mouth and grinned. “Already got butter on ‘em.” He crossed to the sink, because his hand was already starting to sting again, and switched on the faucet. Medium-cool water, not cold water, because that was what you were supposed to do when you were an idiot who burned yourself on frying pans.

Clint very determinedly did not look at Steve as he ran his hand under the water, because here was America’s very own captain, and here was him, putting his hand in medium-cool temperature water because he’d burned it trying to make a grilled cheese. If he had been in the mood for it, he could’ve thought up a bad metaphor, but considering he felt like his skin was going to fall off, he just stared at the little stream of water.

And because it was getting very silent in the kitchen, and because Steve wasn’t leaving ( _ why wasn’t he leaving _ ), Clint’s idea of a good conversation starter was, “I’ll just have to go and get a Band-Aid later.”

“You seem to have a lot of those.” Steve gestured to the spot above Clint’s elbow where he’d banged into the door frame yesterday, to his eyebrow where he’d fallen asleep with his bow in his hand and woken up to jabbing himself in the eye, to the several adorning his shoulder that were left over from his last mission.

Clint shrugged. “Not all of us are super soldiers.” He turned off the water. “Some of us gotta be the regular soldiers. And some of us gotta be the guys standing above the regular soldiers with a weapon that was invented at the same time as, like, the wheel or whatever. Stark likes to bring that up a lot.”

Steve nodded, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, he’s tried to design me a new suit a couple of times. Can’t say they weren’t, uh, eye-catching, but they weren’t really my thing."

“ _ More _ eye-catching than…” Clint gestured to Steve, even though the other man was currently wearing a regular old shirt and jeans. Somehow, Steve always seemed to be wearing the suit even when he  _ wasn’t  _ wearing it, if that made sense. Which it really didn’t, and maybe Clint should be challenging his thoughts a little more.

He did kind of get it, though. S.H.I.E.L.D. had had their doubts about how well a circus performer would be able to handle undercover work, but Clint had never had a problem with switching out the purple tights for the dark fighting gear, to the point where he would probably get more than a few odd looks if he ever walked around the Tower in the former.

Steve laughed, and Clint had the momentary irrational thought of  _ is he reading my thoughts _ before he remembered that they had been talking out loud. “Point.”

He studied Clint a moment longer. “You remember the first time we fought together? Loki?”

_ Do you mean the first time I fought as part of the team, or the time I actively tried to kill most of you?  _ “Can’t say that’s ringing any bells. Are you talking about Loki from accounting?”

“Okay, I probably deserved that.” Steve crossed his arms in that way he had, that was probably just a nervous habit but always made Clint feel like he was about to get a lecture. “I don’t think there was a lot of time to tell you right after the fact, but I appreciated it. How you stepped in to fly the jet when you didn’t have to. You were barely out of… you know. And you still didn’t hesitate.”

Clint nodded. “Yeah. I’d just spent three days being mind-controlled by an alien sociopath; I was a little behind on my good deed for the day.”

“Fine. I just wanted you to know.” Steve was still watching him. His eyes were very blue and Clint should probably stop paying attention to that.

He crossed his own arms, mirroring Steve. “Why are we talking about this, anyway? That was, like… two months ago. It’s July, right?”

Steve paused and looked around the kitchen as though considering his options among the microwave and the cabinets before meeting Clint’s eyes again. “... because you’re crying.”

“What?” Clint touched his face and froze when his hand brushed against wetness. That was… unexpected.

_ How long has  _ that  _ been going on? _

“Oh,” was all he said, faintly.

Steve clapped a hand against his shoulder, not in the way Thor did it, where you felt like you were going to be hammered into the ground like a tent stake, but the way Steve did it—the way Clint had only seen him do to the rest of the team.

“C’mon,” Steve said. “I wanna find you that Band-Aid.”

* * *

The wind on the roof was chillier than Thor had expected. His cloak would’ve been nice, but the rest of the day had been so warm and sunny that he’d mistakenly believed he would be fine in just a shirt.

Once the sun had set, and the night had spread slowly over the sky, however, Thor was starting to lose the feeling in the tips of his fingers. And for an Asgardian, with lightning pulsing through his veins, that was a little worrying.

He didn’t want to go back inside yet, though. Inside was full of teammates, who he usually liked, but right now the thought of talking to anyone made Thor want to pick up Mjolnir and shoot for the nearest ocean. New York was near an ocean, wasn’t it? How many oceans did Earth have?

Even if he could slip back inside without any of the others noticing him, there was still the fact that once he got inside, there really wasn’t anything to do besides go to bed. And he might not have had the same magical gifts that others in Asgard did, but he knew without a shred of doubt that he would not be able to sleep. Not tonight.

There was a cough from behind him and Thor turned around to find, of all people, Tony Stark, shivering theatrically in the wind as he sidled up next to him at the edge of the rooftop. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised—it was his Tower, after all—but he did take a moment to note the fact that Stark apparently still wore those sunglasses of his when it was the middle of the night.

“Hey,” Tony said by way of greeting, once he caught that Thor had noticed him.

Thor peered down at the street below; so many glittering lights, the streak of cars down the packed road. The reconstruction from the attack on the city was almost completed; he couldn’t see any signs of the destruction that for the first few weeks had been everywhere he turned. “Hey.”

Tony waited. Even though Thor wasn’t looking at him, he could sense the other man bouncing up and down ever-so-slightly on the balls of his feet. “So… why are you on my roof, Hammer Time?”

“I can fly."

“Me too, but that doesn’t mean it’s not completely freezing out here.” Tony blew on his hands as though to illustrate his point, his breath puffing out into the chilly air.

Thor shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t feel the cold as you do.” His fingers were almost completely numb now where they gripped the edge of the railing.

“Well, that’s fantastic for you, but I do feel the cold, so—any chance we can move this conversation inside?” Tony gestured toward the roof door before shoving his hands deep in his pockets.

_ I wasn’t aware we were having a conversation _ , Thor wanted to say, but that was unfair. Tony wasn’t the reason he was out on the roof, after all, even if he could be strange and aggravating at times.

“I’d rather be alone for a bit,” was what he said instead.

Tony was scrutinizing him; he could feel the eyes boring into him even without looking. “You sure about that?”

“No,” Thor admitted.

A car honked in the street below.

“Okay. Whatcha thinking about?” Tony asked. “Point Break,” he added, and Thor would have smiled if his face would’ve let him.

He didn’t see any reason not to be honest; either Tony would leave or he would stay here and keep chattering, and Thor would leave it up to him to make that decision—because, honestly, standing on this roof alone was only making him want to hit something with Mjolnir, and he didn’t think Bruce would appreciate it if he woke him up and asked if the Hulk would want to go a few rounds.

“Loki,” he answered.

Tony winced. Almost audibly. “I should be completely upfront—I didn’t want you to say that.” He paused. “But I’m here to listen. As a teammate and all that.” And despite the sarcasm that seemed to coat every word out of Stark’s mouth, he sounded oddly sincere.

Thor let out a sigh that he almost expected to be able to see in the freezing air. “He faces his punishment on Asgard today.”

“Yeah. That’s the only reason why Fury and the big bosses at S.H.I.E.L.D. let you guys go.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to stop us either way.”

“Thaaaat’s the right attitude.” Tony stepped forward to lean on the railing beside him, his fingers tapping out a pattern on the metal. “How were you planning on finding out, you know, the verdict? Are we gonna have to worry about ravens flying through the windows?” He held up a hand like he’d remembered something. “Or your friend, the one with the gold eyes and the big sword, does he—”

Thor shook his head. “No. I will not find out until I return. Assuming they have even finished by then.”

“Uh, Loki tried to take over the world. No exaggeration necessary. Is there actually a chance they’d let him go?” Tony was trying to hide it, but the pattern he was tapping grew more nervous as he spoke.

“No, of course not,” Thor said. Tony relaxed marginally. “But he’s still a prince of Asgard, technically.” He intended the words to carry all the determination that came with speaking the truth, but they still wrenched a twinge from his stomach.

Tony nodded knowingly. “Ah, nepotism.” He must’ve seen Thor’s face, because he hastily amended it to, “Sorry, was that—listen, I’ve taken part in plenty of nepotism myself, and I realize that’s not a thing to brag about, but you saw the name on the tower, right? Please tell me you at least looked at it before you lightning-ed it up. Pepper and I spent forever arguing over the font of that thing.”

“It isn’t nepotism,” Thor said. He paused and shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe it’s a little bit of nepotism. My mother—she will try to ease Loki’s punishment as much as she can, but I don’t know how much difference that will make.”  _ Either all of it or none of it, depending on Father’s mood. _

“Okay, maybe sixty percent nepotism. Youngest child favoritism, then?” Tony made a wide gesture out at the sky. “I have no idea what that is, by the way. My only source is Rhodey.”

Thor shrugged again.

Tony was quiet for a while, humming with energy (or maybe he was just shivering in the wind) as he continued to watch Thor, maybe waiting for him to say something. His eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses. “You know what? Maybe that’s not completely accurate. Barton’s got an older brother, doesn’t he? I may need to revisit my statement in that case, because I don’t know what the hell happened there, but it sure wasn’t favoritism.” He paused. “If you’re wondering basically anything about this brother, by the way, I can honestly say I have no idea. Barton likes to drop random fun facts about himself out of nowhere like that—I guess that’s the kind of thing you do when you don’t have your own Wikipedia page—”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to Loki,” Thor finally interrupted. His hands clenched around the railing and he felt certain that if Mjolnir had been with him, the sky would have flashed with lightning. “Most likely he will be imprisoned.”

He bent his head so that all he could see was the dark flatness of the roof under his feet. Both of them were silent for a long moment. The only sound came from the harsh wind still blowing and stinging against their faces.

When Thor finally closed his eyes, he was surprised to find a tear slip out.

If Tony noticed, he didn’t say anything—just lifted his hand as though he were about to pat Thor’s shoulder and hovered it there before he thought better and lowered it.

“So what do you say we go inside?”

* * *

Natasha barely registered JARVIS’s pleasant voice echoing out of the elevator speakers as the doors opened and she hurried out as fast as she could, heading straight for her bedroom at the end of the hall.

Well, not as fast as she could. She wasn’t on a mission, after all. Just in the Tower. A Tower that suddenly seemed to have doubled in size, or at least its hallway lengths had, since an eternity passed in the time she was able to get out of the elevator and into her room. An eternity in which anyone could have seen her—she was actually pretty sure she  _ had  _ passed someone in the hallway, but her vision had tunneled by then, with the only path leading to the blessed privacy that was behind her door, and they might not have even noticed her go by, anyway—and anyone could’ve followed her inside, because she lived in a tower full of…

Natasha practically skidded into her room—Stark had offered to carpet it, but she’d declined: too easy to muffle footsteps—and shut the door behind her with a firm click. For a moment she just stood there, her hand wrapped around the doorknob and her forehead pressed to the smooth wood, and then she backed up until she had sunk onto her bed.

There wasn’t much else in the room to sink onto, to be honest. She didn’t really like to have a lot of  _ stuff _ —any non-practical stuff, that is—and too much furniture would only make the room seem more boxed in, despite the fact that it was the size of her entire apartment back when she’d lived in S.H.I.E.L.D. housing.

Her hands came up to cover her face and she spent a few moments just breathing. The sooner she got over whatever ridiculous reaction this had elicited, the sooner she could go downstairs and continue her skillful parade of acting like a normal human being (A game that she was usually the best at, and Thor the worst, for various reasons).

But she had only been there for a minute or so before there came a knock from the other side of her door. 

_ Only one person in this place knocks.  _ Natasha pressed her face deeper into her hands for a second before calling out a muffled, “Come in.”

The door opened, and a cautious Bruce Banner stepped inside, because of course he had been the one she’d passed in the hallway, and of course he had noticed her.

“Hey. Everything okay?”

“Is it that obvious?” Natasha lifted her head to look at him.

“Well, I just noticed you seemed a little… troubled.” He made a motion like he was going to step forward, but decided against it and continued hovering in the doorway.

Natasha pulled her feet up on the bed, even though she was still wearing shoes, just for something to do so she wouldn’t have to look at Bruce. “A compelling theory.”

“Is it wrong?”

“Something just happened. It’s nothing.” She gestured around the room and finally at herself. “And as you can see, I am handling it marvelously.” Things weren’t supposed to get under her skin like this. That was the entire purpose of her training, the entire reason she had the name she did.

Maybe she’d spent too long out of the field.

Bruce was still watching her, even though she had fixed her gaze firmly on the opposite wall. There was nothing there, she just needed something to stare at. Something to occupy her mind and take it away from all the places it had gone in the past hour. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

The  _ if not, I’ll leave _ was unspoken. Natasha kind of liked that about him. However, now that the option was there, she felt a weight on her chest at just the thought of saying “No” and watching him leave the room, and probably sitting here alone for as long as she could stand it before going downstairs and hitting the training room until she could give an honest excuse for her apparent exhaustion.

And it was exhaustion, in a way. Not from lack of sleep, but from the realization that this was something that had always bothered her, deep in the back of her mind on the better days and haunting her steps with the worst—and something that would continue to do so.

And not that she thought talking about it to Bruce would ease it at  _ all _ … but her current way of handling it was clearly: “push it down until you physically can’t anymore,” and while that might have been an excellent strategy for when she was spending her days waking up in one country and falling asleep in another, switching personas and languages and histories like they were sets of clothes, it didn’t seem to work as well when she was attempting to live her life.

Or whatever it was that was supposed to be, now that she was one of the Avengers. Whatever the hell  _ that  _ was supposed to mean.

“Yes,” she decided. “If you’re really sure you want to hear it.”

Bruce shrugged. “I could go get Thor if you’d rather talk to him.”

“I think we can hold off on that as Plan B.” Natasha took in a shaky breath and looked at the floor.

“Is this something that happened just now?”

“Ish.”

Bruce nodded, his hands fiddling with the ends of his sleeves as he searched for another question. “Do you—”

“It was about half an hour ago,” Natasha interrupted. Once she started talking, Bruce immediately went quiet with combined relief and tension—because if anyone could pull  _ that _ particular mix off, it was him. “I was outside—you know, out in the world. Having a look around the city.”

“You haven’t been here before?” Bruce asked incredulously. “I find that kinda hard to believe.”

“Natasha Romanoff hasn’t been to New York City before,” Natasha corrected. “It’s an easy mistake to make.” Her hands were in her lap now, and she absentmindedly squeezed one against the other. “So I was out in the street. And I wasn’t—I didn’t think I needed to be as careful as I normally would, you know? We’re in a city of eight million people, and I don’t exactly walk around wearing the American flag or a glowing beacon in my chest.” She smiled a little, mostly just to give Bruce the permission to. It was gone in another moment, however. “But someone still recognized me. I don’t know  _ why _ , but they…” She waved her hand in the air in a gesture that didn’t really mean anything, but Bruce still nodded.

“‘Hey, look; it’s Black Widow?’”

“Pretty much.” Natasha shook her head. “That’s never happened to me before—I kinda thought all of that stuff would brush over me, and the rest of you…”

“Tony and Steve do get the most of it, I think,” Bruce said. “And Thor, but that’s just because he goes everywhere in a cape. But there’s—I mean, there’s obviously no reason anyone would recognize me, and I thought you and Clint were good at… you know, sliding under the radar.”

“We’re supposed to be.”

“But… that’s not why you’re upset.”

Natasha sighed. “There was… when the other people were around, thanking me for saving the city and asking if I was really a superhero and all of that… there was this little girl. Maybe six years old, pigtails, you know. She was watching me, and so I looked back at her and I waved. I didn’t think…” She stopped herself for a moment before continuing. “She went to point me out to her mother, and her mother… well, she didn’t waste any time before she grabbed that little girl’s hand and turned her right back around.” Next to her, she heard Bruce give an intake of breath. “It’s so stupid. But I can still see her, see how afraid she was, and then the knowing that it was because of me—”

Then she really had to stop herself, because her voice was fraying around the edges and threatening to break.

She didn’t dare look at Bruce’s face, but his voice was only marginally steadier than her own as he said, “I’m sorry, Natasha.”

“No, it—it makes sense. I don’t know why I wasn’t prepared; you can’t turn on the news without hearing that  _ ‘are the Avengers really heroes’ _ conspiracy trash, and I know my job isn’t that… family-friendly.” She stared at her hands again. “But every time I think I’ve put this kind of thing behind me—”

She stopped. The burning in her eyes had turned liquid, the first few tears sliding out and tracking down her cheek.

What the  _ hell. _

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said hastily, wiping her eyes. “I never do that.”

“Maybe that’s why, then.” That was what made her finally chance a look at Bruce, who had moved from the doorway to standing at the end of her bed, and his eyes were full of the sympathy that would have pissed her off if there hadn’t been a tinge of understanding to it. Maybe Bruce was the right person to talk to about this, after all.

“Guess it’s a good thing S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t letting me back in the field anytime soon, huh?” Natasha tried to laugh, but she didn’t seem to have the breath for it. The tears were still slowly falling from her eyes, but just fast enough that she couldn’t wipe them all away.

Bruce shrugged. “Hey, I’m not complaining.” He offered a sideways smile that she felt a burst of appreciation for. “There’s a lot of, uh, big personalities in this tower; we need  _ someone  _ to keep us on an even keel.”

Natasha managed a real laugh this time. “If  _ I’m _ the one keeping things sane around here, then maybe the Avengers really are doomed.”

“Maybe.”

She waited. When almost a full minute had passed and Bruce didn’t show any signs of elaboration, she turned to look at him. “That’s the part where you disagree with me, Banner.”

“Sorry,” Bruce said. “I’ve never been very good at reassuring people?” And it was the way he said it, tilted up almost like a question at the end, that made Natasha pat the empty spot on the bed next to her.

“C’mon, then. Sit.”

Bruce looked startled. “What?”

“On the bed. Get you some practice at reassuring people.”

“I don’t know if I wanna learn Natasha Romanoff’s method of reassuring people,” Bruce said wryly, but he did sit down, making sure to leave space between them.

They sat for a moment, and then Bruce spoke again. “You know, whether any of them want to admit it or not, you did help save the city. You probably the most of any of us, except Tony—you stuck the scepter into the portal and shut it down. That was—if people should praise anything that we did, they should see it.”

Natasha shrugged. “Life isn’t fair like that.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Look at that, you’re being reassuring already.”

“Happy to help.”

The two of them were quiet a long time. Then, slowly, Natasha scooted closer on the bed, drawing away the distance between them inch by inch. It was something she could do so inconspicuously that Bruce didn’t even notice until she was leaning her head onto his shoulder.

The contact was warm, and Natasha closed her eyes as the last tears were blinked away.

* * *

_ He was being chased, or he was doing the chasing. _

_ Running through woods that almost looked familiar, but there wasn’t time to stop and look around, and so everything blurred as he ran by, glancing over his shoulder in quick bursts as leaves and branches and rocks drew themselves together into yet another obstacle. His heart was pounding out of his chest, and that wasn’t good, was it? He had to stop that, had to, had to stop it right now before— _

_ A flash of vivid green from the shadows, and he felt himself fall— _

Bruce’s eyes shot open as he woke with a jolt, his fingers instinctively flying toward his wrist. But he didn’t wear his heart monitor anymore—not that he needed it now to tell him that it was pumping  _ very very fast _ —and anyway, he was in bed. Asleep. Or he had been.

It came filtering back as he stared through the pitch-darkness at the opposite wall. His bedroom. The Tower. The Avengers. All completely whole and non-destroyed. For now, at least.

With a start, Bruce realized that there were tears pricking at his eyes. He rubbed at his face quickly, making a halfhearted effort to disentangle himself from the sheets before he accepted that it was probably a lost cause.

He hadn’t woken up like this—from a nightmare—in over a year, but ever since Loki, when he’d become the Hulk twice in the span of twelve hours… well. It would be appropriate to say they’d come roaring back with a vengeance. He felt like he was going to throw up every time he closed his eyes.

All thoughts of this were banished, however, when he turned his tired gaze around the room and saw Clint Barton lounging on a chair (he didn’t even have a chair like that in his bedroom; Clint must’ve dragged it in from somewhere) and fiddling with the end of his bow.

“Do you carry that thing everywhere?” Bruce asked. Then he caught himself and changed tack. “What are you doing in here?”

Clint shrugged. His feet were hooked over the back of the chair in a position that would’ve sent anyone else overbalancing and crashing onto the floor, but he sat there as easily as if he were lying on a couch. “JARVIS said something was up with you. So I—”

“So you assumed I was gonna transform,” Bruce finished. It wasn’t a question, but Clint probably wouldn’t have acknowledged it even if it was, because he was Clint.

At least, being Clint, he didn’t try to deny it.

Bruce rubbed his eyes again—it didn’t really matter; Clint was a trained secret agent and had definitely already noticed that he’d been crying, but it at least allowed him to pretend that everything was perfectly fine and JARVIS’s warning had just been a false alarm—and drew his arms closer to his chest. 

He waited, with a silence that he really thought was quite pointed, but Clint didn’t move from the chair.

Finally, Clint seemed to notice that Bruce was watching him and looked up. “Could you do that?”

“Do what?”  _ Why are you still in my room? _

“Transform. In your sleep. Has it ever happened?” It was the middle of the night, but Clint sounded exactly as awake as he had eight hours ago, somehow managing to make the question about the enormous rage monster Bruce was hiding inside of him sound as normal as if he were asking about the weather.

He was wearing pajamas, too. Sort of—it was just shorts and a largish T-shirt, but at least it was proof he didn’t wear his black S.H.I.E.L.D. gear all the time.

“Tony already asked me that,” Bruce said, mostly to keep himself from commenting on the pajamas. “Like two days after we met.” He’d asked a lot of other things, too, but after the first twenty or so had apparently decided to spread them out. It was now two months later, and Tony hadn’t run out yet.

Clint nodded and waited patiently, his eyes on Bruce. He looked genuinely curious, which Bruce hadn’t expected.

Bruce sighed. “Yeah, I’ve done it before. Not in a while, though, and it’s a lot less frequent than when I’m awake. It used to happen a lot more, back when I was…” He made a vague hand gesture in the air before suddenly stopping himself.

What was he  _ doing.  _ It was the middle of the night and here he was talking calmly about the Other Guy to Clint Barton.  _ Clint Barton. _

He must’ve been more shaken than he’d thought.

“Sorry,” he said, somewhat abruptly. “I know I’m not the person you want to be talking to right now.” He didn’t know a whole lot about Clint Barton, to be perfectly honest—Clint had skipped over the whole introductory session (ha) in the helicarrier, and when they had met for the first time, Bruce had been eight feet tall and bright green; and not much had changed in the two months that had passed—but this, he did feel fairly confident about.

Apparently he was wrong about that, too, because Clint got a weird expression on his face. “I was gonna say the same thing, actually.” He bent his head down to poke at something on his bow again, so that Bruce almost missed his response.

“What?” Bruce blinked. “No, you’re…” Another vague hand gesture that both he and Clint watched for a minute before he dropped his hand back on the bed. Because, really, what did he think he was gonna say?

There was a long pause. Finally, Clint spoke up again.

“So. Everything good?” He could’ve been talking to the bow.

“Yes.”

Clint slid his legs off the chair and stood up in one fluid motion. That had always seemed odd to Bruce, how the same man could move with such precision that he sometimes even managed to startle Steve Rogers and yet without fail trip over the step to the kitchen every morning. He slung the bow over his back (he didn’t even have arrows with him, what the hell had he been planning to do if Bruce  _ was  _ transforming?) and stepped over to the door.

_ Huh. That was easy.  _ Maybe Bruce had been spending too much time with Tony, who wouldn’t have left his room without a minimum of three more hours of debate.

Clint yanked the door open. “If you’re sure, I’m gonna head back down, but, uh… JARVIS is here, yeah?”

Bruce nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”

Clint paused on his way out the door and gave Bruce a sort of nod back before closing it, leaving Bruce alone again in the dark.

The memory of the nightmare still tingled along Bruce’s skin, along with the faintest rumbling in the back of his head, but he would’ve been lying if he said it wasn’t just a little bit easier to get back to sleep.

* * *

Steve was sprinting at top speed, which for him was— _ significantly  _ fast. He heard the sound of millions of blades whirring behind him that had become all too familiar once they’d discovered that this mission had not been, as they’d thought, a routine investigation on an abandoned weapons facility.

Not unless giant poison-shooting death machines were routine, anyway.

Steve didn’t dare glance over his shoulder even as the noise roared closer and closer on his heels, the hot steam from its vents blowing against his back. Instead, he aimed for the one piece of cover on the wide landscape and cleared the top of the boulder in an adrenaline-boosted leap.

He landed with a roll in the grass and hastily pressed his back up against the rock, his shield shoved up against his chest. His breath was loud in his ears, only competing with the sound of his racing heart. Hopefully, the machine would pass right over him and continue down the field in its search for human targets…

“Hey, Rogers.”

Steve turned a little too quickly to find Natasha crouched next to him, one hand on the rock behind them and one on the handgun at her thigh. He didn’t know what good she thought that would do against this  _ thing _ , but he was relieved to have some kind of backup, at least. He hadn’t seen anyone else since Tony and Thor had taken off into the sky, the Hulk had leapt out of the quinjet, and Clint had… gone somewhere. He should probably worry about that, but there were more pressing issues.

“You’re in my spot,” Natasha continued. She grinned in a way that was completely at odds with the situation. “I was here first.” 

The ground shook as the machine barreled toward them.

“Next time I’ll be sure to find somewhere else,” Steve said breathlessly. He popped his head around the side of the rock and had barely caught a glimpse before he was whipping back. “It’s getting closer.”

Natasha jumped to her feet at almost the same time he did. The roar from the giant machine was deafening, but he could still make out her shout as both of them broke into a run. “I take it back, then! It’s all yours!”

The grass blew and twisted in the wind as the machine poured out smoke, the air clouding so much Steve could hardly see the field ahead of them. “Where are we going?” he yelled, the metallic screeching from above almost drowning him out.

“The jet’s right there!” Natasha pointed as she ran, her feet lifting off the ground mere seconds before the blades of the machine rolled over it, chopping the field into a spray of dirt.

Steve squinted in the fog—and then he saw it. The quinjet, parked idly in a hollow half a field away. They’d be able to get in—Tony had just coded the jet to respond to each of the Avengers, even though he hadn’t had the chance to try it out yet. Whether they could make it there in time, though…

He ran faster, covering distance that most people would’ve taken seconds to cross in mere breaths. Natasha dropped farther and farther behind, even though she was obviously going at her own full speed.

And still, the machine was right on their tail, eating up the field and spraying it back out in that cloud of steam and gas and poison.

Steve was going so fast that he almost didn’t register when the side of the quinjet loomed up in front of him, and would’ve smacked right into the door if he didn’t manage to stop himself. He scrambled for the button on the side and the door began to lower with a faint whir.

He turned. Natasha was still yards away, sprinting as fast as she could through the grass. Behind her loomed the machine—a huge silvery-gray monstrosity still spraying that thick yellow goop out of the guns on its sides. Wherever the goop splattered against the ground, the grass shriveled up and turned brown. Enough trails of steam had already risen from the pools of poison that it was starting to render the air completely opaque.

“Don’t be a gentleman, Rogers!” Natasha shouted at him when she realized he was still standing motionless beside the open door. “Get in the damn jet!”

Steve waited for another half second before sticking the shield on his back and obeying, but he stayed right at the edge, hovering between inside and outside as Natasha glanced behind her and doubled her speed, running and running as the machine’s shadow crept closer and closer above her head and—

Natasha leaped and landed with a practiced roll on the floor of the jet. She was up again in an instant, red hair flying around her face as she dashed for a control panel on the wall and punched in something on a keypad.

The door started to raise again, and both Steve and Natasha stood still for a moment, the machine’s roar thundering in their ears.

“Uh, Nat—”

“I know, I know.”

The quinjet shook like there was an earthquake knocking it back and forth, but it held firm in its place on the field, and the door was almost—almost—almost closed—

Steve was staring up at that last little slice of sunlight when one of the machine’s guns pointed right at him—and fired.

As though in slow motion, he watched as a glob of that yellow poison soared through the air, through the sliver of the open door, and—

_ Splat. _

Steve screamed. It was like a punch straight to the eye, but a million times worse—he was on fire, his entire face was on  _ fire _ and he  _ couldn’t see couldn’t see couldn’t see— _

He was only aware of hitting the floor when he felt himself slam into something hard and cold. He scrabbled at his face, the need to rub whatever this was out of his eyes burning through every muscle in his body. 

_ He couldn’t see— _

There was a gasp, and then someone else was on the floor beside him, kneeling so that they were barely an inch away from his shoulders. And it was Natasha, he knew it was Natasha, but he  _ couldn’t see _ and  _ what if  _ and  _ he couldn’t see— _

“Steve? Shit.” There was a hand on his face now, tilting it up to the ceiling. “Shit, shit, shit. I’m gonna be right back. Don’t touch this, okay?”

“Nat—” Steve managed to choke out before his eyes gave another sharp twinge and he made an involuntary noise. His own hands were covered in the goopy stuff now, and he could feel it starting to eat away at his gloves. “I can’t see.”

“I know.” Her voice came from a few feet away, and there were some rummaging noises as what sounded like compartments opened and shut. “Bruce should have a med kit here somewhere,” she muttered, half to herself. “Where the hell did he put it—hang on.”

Another compartment clicked shut; footsteps crossed the floor before two somethings were thunked down. A moment later, Natasha was there again—he could hear her careful breaths and feel her moving next to him.

“I’m gonna wipe it off now, okay? Hold still.”

Steve made what he thought was a nod. “Don’t you touch it either—it’s burning—”

“I know.” Had she said that already? Everything seemed to be tilting, and suddenly his palms were bracing against the floor.

And then something—it felt like a cloth—touched his eyes, and Steve couldn’t hold back the hiss of pain as everything whited out.

_ It burns it burns it burns it burns— _

“Stop,” he gasped out. “Stop, stop, don’t touch it—” She wasn’t listening to him, she couldn’t feel the poison eating away at his eyes, she was still trying to clean it away—

“If you punch me right now, Rogers, I swear—” Natasha said through gritted teeth, and the cloth froze somewhere above his nose.

He hadn’t even realized he’d been… well, he’d been almost thrashing around, trying to get away.

“Sorry.”

“Just hold still, it’s almost gone.”

It didn’t feel gone. It felt like someone had poured oil in his eyes and lit a match, like someone had reached in with long nails and started peeling apart the skin layer by layer. He imagined blistering holes in his face and resisted the urge to touch it again.  _ What if the serum doesn’t fix this? _

The cloth was lifted away, and Natasha let out a slow breath. “Okay. I don’t think I can get the rest of it off without squishing it more into your eyes, so… are you up for Plan B?”

“I’m up for anything at this point,” Steve groaned. He tried to stay as still as he could.

“Good.” Without warning, something cold and wet splashed onto his face, and he had to bite down on his tongue to keep from crying out.

It still burned—god, it burned—for a few seconds, but once the water had washed away, Steve felt the pain slowly start to ebb.

He blinked cautiously and opened his eyes, ignoring the smarting coming from them. The quinjet came into focus, blurry from the tears that were welling in his eyes.

Steve just stared at the floor, cool and gray and flat, and his hands that were barely holding him up against it for a solid ten seconds before he dared to lift his gaze.

Natasha was kneeling beside him, peering entirely too close into his face. Noticing this, she backed off, and Steve spotted the open med kit and a shiny pink water bottle with the Stark Industries logo lying by her side.

“Status?” she asked. Steve nodded. “That’s a relief. Once the others get back, we can get some proper medical attention to take a look at you.”

“Thanks.” Tears were still leaking down his face, which he was sure must have been bright red by now. He debated drying it with the sleeve of his uniform, but who knew what kind of dirt and blood and sweat  _ that _ thing had dried on it.

What a sight he was going to be for the rest of the team.

Natasha’s mouth tilted into a smile like she’d read his mind. “Do you want a tissue or something first?”

Steve laughed.

* * *

The air was full of smoke.

Smoke everywhere, as far as he could see, which wasn’t far at all now.

If someone had shown him a picture of the scene before him, he’d have guessed it to be a shot from an apocalypse movie—something contrived and with a budget focused more on CGI than scriptwriting, but that would make more at the box office than whatever talking-animal animation was its contender—or maybe the scene of a nuclear fallout.

He’d never guess it was his own city.

Tony fumbled for the release in his suit, and practically fell out of it and onto the street, or at least what he thought had been the street underneath the wreckage and the rubble.

He turned in a circle, but the air was gray everywhere he looked, a ring of dust hovering over every collapsed building, every overturned car, every fallen street sign.

He was completely alone. And as sucky as that was, it was better than the sight he kept expecting to see as his eyes darted around the destroyed street: an arm reaching from underneath one of the cars, a pool of blood mixing with the dust, lifeless bodies piled in the debris.

No, they’d cleared everyone out—and thank god they had, because once the streets had started exploding (someone—a real piece of work, that guy had been—had apparently been storing Chitauri technology in his basement, which had blown up in his face figuratively and literally when one of his upstairs neighbors had forgotten to turn off their stove before leaving for work) they would have needed a lot more than six people to evacuate them all.

Tony stumbled on a sticking-out piece of what used to be sidewalk and barely caught himself on a smashed windowsill. Cuts sliced across his palms, but he hardly felt them.

Dust stuck in his throat, and he let out a cough that turned into more and more as he pulled himself back to his feet and made his way back to where the Iron Man suit stood, unoccupied, like a strange metal sentinel to go with the dystopian scene.

“JARVIS?” he croaked, and realized he was tearing up. There was dust everywhere: under his eyelids like grains of sand, in his mouth, in his nose. “Uh, send—send a message to S.H.I.E.L.D. Don’t let them bring the civilians back in yet. The last one… we didn’t find it in time.”

The AI’s voice echoed from inside the suit. “Of course, sir. Would you like to see a damage report?”

Tony waved a hand. “We’re paying for it all.” He squinted into a gap between two buildings. “J, is that—”

He didn’t need to finish the question; there was a skittering of rocks from the next street over, and then the Avengers came staggering into the middle of the road.

It was a slow process—several of them were leaning on each other for support, all of them almost tripped in a yawning crack in the pavement or an exposed pipeline at one point or another, and all of them looked like they were one push to the side away from collapsing where they stood. Finally, though, Tony managed to close the rest of the gap between them, his eyes landing on the closest face, which turned out to be Steve.

“Cap,” he said, and that’s when he remembered that he was crying. He shoved a hand across his face, but it was already too late—and besides, the tear tracks would have been even more visible in the layer of dust that had settled over him.

Steve nodded, his head drooping with exhaustion. There was a rip in the sleeve of his uniform where something had gouged through it, and he was barely holding his shield up above the ground. “Hey, Tony.”

“Are you—is everyone—are you—” Tony glanced from Avenger to Avenger, the same headcount repeating over and over in his head. “—all right?”

“More or less.” That was Natasha. Tony couldn’t tell, between her and Clint, who was holding who upright. They were both pressed into each other’s sides, heads against shoulders and arms hanging in a loose grasp as their legs seemed to be figuring out how to work. “You?”

“Yeah.” Tony tried to take a breath, but there was dust coating the inside of his mouth, and he burst out, “I couldn’t—this is my fault. I had JARVIS doing scans and I missed—”

“No, it’s not,” Natasha interrupted. She swayed into Clint, who almost fell over before steadying himself with a visible effort. “I was closest, I should’ve—”

“That’s bullshit; I was closer’n you,” Clint protested. There was a line of blood trickling from just above his right eye and his quiver hung empty on his back.

Steve held up a hand. “Stop it. I think I should take responsibility for—”

“Based on  _ no logic ever _ —” Tony started, but Thor stepped in. He was missing half his cape and there was a large bruise on his forehead, but other than that he seemed in the best shape of all of them—which was fortunate, because he was practically carrying a mostly-unconscious and mostly-naked Bruce in his arms.

“I could’ve gotten to the site the fastest with Mjolnir,” he said firmly. “This is my fault for allowing myself to become distracted.”

“You were literally evacuating people; I saw you,” Natasha said. “Don’t even try to say that you weren’t—”

Bruce made a noise and shifted against Thor _. Guess he’s only slightly unconscious, then.  _ “Should’ve been me,” he mumbled in a voice so quiet even the serum-enhanced, super-spy, and Asgardian-sensed members of the team had to lean in. “... invulnerable.”

Thor frowned and pulled Bruce closer; the rest of them stared at each other in mingled exasperation. The dust floated through the air and somewhere in the distance, another section of building crumbled into the street.

“All right,” Natasha finally said, breaking the silence. “What do you say we table this discussion for when we’re  _ not _ inhaling particles of building?”

The relief was almost audible. Clint actually did close his eyes.

“Great idea,” Tony said. He turned to Steve. “So, you gonna say it?”

Steve looked confused for a moment before it dawned on him. He shook his head as the team slowly began the long walk out of the cloud of dust that had eaten the city. Tony wasn’t sure how far it went—hopefully not all the way to the Tower. “You only get one assemble per day, sorry.”

“Come on.” Tony’s foot hit a chunk of pavement and he stumbled. He looked back up just in time to see Steve withdrawing his arm. “I think you’ve got another one in you.”

“If you want one so much, why don’t  _ you _ say it?”

“It’s different when it comes from you. You’ve got the whole  _ voice _ , the whole… Nat, back me up here.”

“He’s got a point, Steve.”

“Ha!"

“Romanoff, you traitor.”

“Are you guys coming or not? We can talk when we’re— _ anywhere _ but here, seriously.”

“Calm down, Barton, we’ve got a senior citizen with us.”

“All right, I’m just saying Thor’s gonna leave us behind.”

“Not when I get back in the suit he’s not.”

The Avengers made their way out of the street, still bickering until they ran out of the energy for it and resorted to tired whispering back and forth. The sun was setting when the dust began to clear from the air.

And when it did, they could all see each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
